In 2012, the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) research project was controversially defunded by the federal government, and responsibility for it passed to the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

If you’re already wilting at such political minutiae, but are nagged by the feeling that you should be more clued in on environmental matters, you might feel the urge to splash some cold water on your face at this point.

Or you could book tickets for The Watershed, which combines a deluge of such information, lucidly decoded, with a droll drama about a squabbling family taking a road trip across Canada.

The family in question is that of Annabel Soutar, artistic director of the Montreal-based documentary theatre company Porte Parole which, in collaboration with Toronto’s Crow’s Theatre, is bringing The Watershed to the Centaur Nov. 8 to Dec. 4 as part of a national tour.

As with other Porte Parole shows — like the hugely successful Seeds, about a Saskatchewan farmer’s battle with agrochemical giant Monsanto, and the still-controversial Fredy, about the inquest into the Villanueva police shooting — The Watershed has Soutar placing herself as a character at the centre of things.

The first half of the play sees her interviewing, or trying to interview, various interested and involved parties.

In the second half, she and actor husband, Alex Ivanovici, their two preteen children and the daughter of the show’s director, Chris Abraham, take a Winnebago trip from Montreal to Fort McMurray, Alta., to see for herself the oilsands that are central to questions about the sustainability of our freshwater supply.

Soutar is being played by Liisa Repo-Martell who, in another intertwining of life and theatre, happens to be Abraham’s wife. Ivanovici had been playing himself on the tour. Except now he has broken his ankle, and is being replaced at the Centaur by Daniel Brochu. The play premièred during Toronto’s 2015 Pan Am games.

During the road trip, Ivanovici sometimes comes across as prickly, not least because a lucrative role in an X-Men movie hangs in the balance. Other times, he seems to be a tower of strength as Soutar is thrown into panic about the enormity of the project.

How did it feel living through those moments, knowing they were destined to be played out on stage?

“I quickly learned to understand the difference between who I was as a character for the purpose of telling the story, and who I am in my wife’s life,” Ivanovici explained in a (pre-accident) phone conversation.

“Occasionally, when things got heated or sensitive, that line could be challenging to remember.”

Given the family is roaring across thousands of miles in a gas-guzzling behemoth while drinking from Styrofoam cups and snacking on beef jerky, the disconnect between such consumption and the environmental message of the project can’t help but stand out. In fact, as Ivanovici points out, it’s consciously woven into the narrative of the show.

“We’re all occasionally hypocritical,” he said. “We have a certain set of values that we live by, and sometimes our actions belie those values. And the question of how tolerable our own behaviour is to ourselves is both comic and tragic and had to be part of the story.”

(I can vouch for the reality of such behaviour: So absorbed was I in reading the published text of The Watershed, I inadvertently left a tap running after making myself a coffee).

“There are moments of failure, and failure is funny if you’re willing to admit it,” continued Ivanovici. “It can also be informative. We do a lot of laughing at ourselves in the show, and that includes our kids.”

So how did the Soutar-Ivanovici kids, Beatrice and Ella, and Abraham’s daughter, Hazel, feel about seeing themselves played on stage?

“Actually my kids have never complained, but Hazel was a little upset when she first saw it, because her character made the audience laugh so much,” he said. “She thought they were laughing at her, and her parents had to explain that, actually, the audience were charmed by her intelligence and her trueness to herself. She has such a wonderful earnest quality.”

Another family member portrayed on stage is Soutar’s father, Ian, who died this year (the published script is dedicated to him). An investment manager with a distinctly conservative outlook, he provides a counterweight to Soutar’s more leftish views during several dialectical discussions.

“It was clear that the story would have no traction if it was just one side of the story,” Ivanovici said. “What’s nice about having Ian’s voice in the play is that he’s not intolerant or extreme or unsympathetic to the values that his daughter brings forward. In fact he’s attempting to understand them.”

Ivanovici may be temporarily out of action as far as treading the boards is concerned, but he has plenty to keep him busy. He’s working on another documentary theatre project, a continuance of sorts of the very first project he and Soutar worked on — Novembre, about an imminent Quebec election — when they launched Porte Parole in 1998.

“I’m doing a project called November about American democracy and the upcoming election,” he explained. “I was in Niagara Falls yesterday interviewing people on my day off from the show. I was up at 7 a.m. speaking with a friend who’s in predictive data analysis.”

He laughed before cheerfully speaking both for himself and for Soutar. “Who can bemoan the privilege of being curious as a profession?”

Annabel Soutar’s Fredy, which was presented at La Licorne last March, was in the news again this week after one of its cast, Ricardo Lamour, dissociated himself from it, saying it should never have been produced and citing absence of consent from the Villanueva family. Porte Parole had been planning to remount the play as a touring production.

In an open letter responding to Lamour’s decision, Soutar wrote: “All of us enjoyed working with Ricardo and welcomed the insight that he brought to our creation process.” She added: “He is, first and foremost, an inspiring social justice activist. … (His) advocacy aims to demonstrate that Fredy died unjustifiably at the hands of a Montreal police officer,” whereas “the goal of the play differs from his advocacy goals. The play is a nuanced portrait of a highly mediatized public incident.”

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